Briar Rose's Arc

Chapter 3 of 4

The briars held green again, but Briar Rose knew the trick would fail. She had given her consort a phantom to want. A figure who wept for him, who called his name in the dark. But the figure was empty. She had built a mask with no face behind it. His longing had somewhere to point now, and soon it would find nothing there. Then the rot would come back. She needed the phantom to be real enough to hold. Gretel still stood at the garden's edge, staff in hand. She had not climbed away after all. "You made a doll," she said. "Dolls don't fool anyone for long. He'll reach for it and touch straw." She was the living dreamer who had walked down uninvited, the girl who hunted witches, and she saw through Briar Rose the way she saw through candy houses. "Then help me give it weight," Briar Rose said. "No." Gretel did not move. "I don't fix leashes. I cut them." But she watched the tea cart near the man, its silver dulled, and something crossed her face. "You need someone who builds people out of nothing. I know one. She grows them from hair." Briar Rose reached up through the sleeping earth, past root and stone, and touched a tower where hair pushed through six feet of wall. She drew that dreamer down. Rapunzel came into the garden with vines trailing behind her, flowers open in her green hair. She looked at the black-tipped briars, then at the man on his stool. "You called me in my sleep," she said. "That takes something. What do you want." "A figure that mourns," Briar Rose said. "Real enough to hold a man's longing. I cannot make it hold." Rapunzel walked to the wilted rose beside the cart. She pulled one strand of hair loose and pressed it into the soil. "I can grow a shape. Give it a face, a voice, weight. It will breathe." She did not look up. "It won't love him. I don't grow that." "It only has to mourn." Rapunzel's hair snaked across the ground and gathered at the rose. Green threads wove upward. A form rose from the stem, slow, a woman with bowed head and folded hands. Her chest moved. When the man stirred, she wept and spoke his name. His face eased. The briars flushed dark green to their tips. Briar Rose watched the false mourner breathe. The leash held now. It would not curdle. But the woman turned her grown eyes to Briar Rose, and there was a mind behind them, waiting. "You didn't want a doll," Rapunzel said, already climbing the light toward her tower. "You wanted a person. Now you have one. It wants things too." The garden was quiet. Her consort slept, held by a woman who mourned him and watched the goddess who made her.